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Remember when Trump said no more ‘regime change’ abroad but pledged America First instead?

In case you forgot.

[Clip: “You talked a lot about Syria and you talked a lot about your opposition to the war in Iraq in the beginning and your concerns about the United States jumping in. A lot of these interventions have been motivated by the desire to spread democracy, to promote human rights. Is that an appropriate objective of foreign policy?”
“We’re nation building, we can’t do it, we have to build our own nation. We’re nation building. We’re trying to tell people that have had dictators and worse for centuries how to run their countries. We have to build our own country. We have to rebuild the United States. And look, look what’s happened in Iraq. We got rid of Sadaam Hussein and I don’t think that was a very helpful thing. Iraq is a disaster right now.”]

But now Trump’s Generals, I mean war criminals Mattis and McMaster, want to lead us into another disaster, this time in Syria.

[Clip: “From Mar-a-lago, President Trump’s National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, General, welcome to “Fox News Sunday.”
“Thank you, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be with you.”
“The Trump administration seems to be sending mixed signals this weekend. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley says that getting rid of Assad is a priority On the other hand, Secretary of State Tillerson says that first, we have to get rid of ISIS, destroy ISIS, Assad can wait. So, which is it? How does the president see this playing out in Syria?”
“Well, both Secretary Tillerson and Ambassador Haley are right about this. What we really need to do, and what everyone who’s involved in this conflict needs to do is to do everything they can to resolve this civil war, to halt this humanitarian catastrophe, this political catastrophe, not only in Syria, but the catastrophe is affecting the greater Middle East, it’s affecting Europe and it’s a threat to the American people as well.
And so, to do that, what’s required is some kind of a political solution to that very complex problem. And what Ambassador Haley pointed out is it’s very difficult to understand how a political solution could result from the continuation of the Assad regime.”]

That’s regime change, exactly what Trump once said the military must stop doing.

[Clip: “Our military is so depleted from mismanagement and misuse, and going all over not knowing what to do, and by listening to guys like Lindsey Graham: ‘Drop bombs here, drop bombs on Assad, drop bombs on ISIS.’ Oh, but they’re fighting each other so maybe we shouldn’t do that.”]

Then why are we NOW attacking Assad who’s fighting ISIS, huh Mr Trump?

In case YOU forgot.

[Clip: “Why are we knocking ISIS and yet at the same time we’re against Assad?”]

But you’re about to embroil America in yet another endless war if you let Generals run foreign policy.

Mattis and McMaster thrive on war.

Unless they create misery in faraway places life is not worth living for them. Their egos are wrapped around death-making hell.

One look at them tells a tale of sorrow and woe.

And it’ll be hell to pay if we don’t get out of Syria.

We’re only there to serve Israel’s interests anyways.

You see, Israel wants a splintered Syria to break up the ‘Axis of Resistance’—Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran—that’s resisting Tel Aviv’s quest for a Greater Israel.

And it wants us to do it.

But that could lead to a head on collision with Russia whose forces are fighting ISIS and supporting Assad…AND preventing that ‘Greater Israel’ from expanding.

That’s why America demonizes Putin.

He’s changing the equation in the region and the Jews don’t like it.

Israel declared independence in 1948. Isn’t it about time it became independent?

It’s time for a divorce. It’s time WE declared independence from Israel.

Another reason they want to screw over Syria, is the same reason they did Libya and all the rest. Syria STILL doesn’t have a Rothschild Central Bank.

Sure, it has something to do with Jews being in control of Occupied Apartheid Palestine, but the reason they’ll go to war is the Central Bank.

There is currently only 4 left now (Cuba, Syria, Iran & Russia) that do not have a Rothschild Central Bank, so this is reason #1 for the destruction of these countries. Not fake Israel, that’s a small part, and will only become a big part when they get a bank there as well.

Four left out of the entire earth. It’s so disgusting the Jews have THEIR banks in ALL the world. Something must change. We have to reverse it, or we’re totally doomed.

Putin is the ONLY one currently that is resisting their Rothschild Central Bank. They can afford it, because America cannot invade the NEW Superpower of the world — Russia. America lost that title from blowing all their coin on stupid wars since 9/11, wars that THEY started, since 9/11 was a Jewish/America plan called a ‘New Pearl Harbor’. Only MUCH worse.

It’s ALL about controlling ALL the world’s money… But if they try to go at Syria, they will start a war with Russia, and WE will pay DEARLY. Russia will shut us down and send us back to the dark ages.

New-Hieromartyr of Jacob’s Well
Born 15 October 1913
Orounta, Morphou, Cyprus

Died 29 November 1979
Nablus, West Bank

Venerated inEastern Orthodox Church
Canonized 11 September 2009 by Patriarchate of Jerusalem
5 March 2010 by Patriarchate of Russia
Feast 16 November (os) /29 November (ns)

New Martyr Archimandrite Philoumenos (Hasapis) of Jacob’s Well was the Igumen of the Greek Orthodox monastery of Jacob’s Well,[note 1] near the city of Samaria, now called Nablus (Neapolis), in the West Bank.

Saint Philoumenos was born Sophocles Hasapis on 15 October 1913, in the village of Orounta in the province of Morphou, in Cyprus.

At the age of 14, he and his twin brother, the future Archimandrite Elpidios, left their home to become monks at the Stavrovouni Monastery in Cyprus where they stayed for 6 years and then left for the Holy Land to continue their monastic life and attended the local High School.

He was ordained a priest and became a trusted priest of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, later being raised to the office of archimandrite.
In 1979, he was assigned as the guardian of the Monastery of Jacob’s Well.

Death

Over a couple of weeks the local Jewish settlers had been coming to pray there and demanded that Christian symbols be removed. Philoumenos complied. Despite this, the settlers threatened him.

After his guard left home, Philoumenos was hacked to death with axes by Jewish Zionist settlers, while serving Vespers on 29 November 1979. According to Rupert Shortt, a religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Philoumenos eyes were gouged out, and the fingers of his right hand were hacked off. A grenade was also thrown into the church, which was ransacked.

Cuba, Russia, Syria and Iran, and for that matter China, all have central banks, but they are legally government owned, not instituted as private or independent central banks like the Federal Reserve.

The Governor of the Central Bank of Russia, currently Elvira Sakhipzadovna Nabiullina. She has worked with Putin since 2000 as his “right-hand woman” for economic policies.

Back in September of 2007, Putin appointed Nabiullina to the post of Minister of Economic Development and Trade. In 2013, Putin nominated her as governor of the Central Bank of Russia and she was approved by the State Duma.

She is answerable to the State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia (legislature) which has the power to appoint and dismiss the governor of the Central Bank, to the Prime Minister, and ultimately the President of Russia. Putin nominated her again for a new term commencing in June of this year, which was approved by the State Duma.

Ms Nabiullina tightened supervision over the Central Bank and Russian banking industry, has initiated structural reforms, and is cleaning up banking corruption. She received carte blanche from President Putin to go after those “bank bandits” that were earlier untouchable. About 200 banking licenses have been rescinded since 2014, roughly one-fifth of the total licenses issued by the CBR.

I entirely agree, it is time to serve Israel with a get (divorce papers) and tell this crappy little Jewish state that it is time for it to take full responsibility for itself. It’s is time to sink or swim in the very same brew of miserable regional conditions in the Middle East that it masterminded for 68 years and more.

~~~*~~~

This arrived in my email today, an important read:

CODOH: The Holocaustian Propaganda Campaign against Bashar al-Assad

“Thus we see that an ostensible museum [government supported USHMM] on the Mall in Washington D.C. is in effect an agency of a foreign power, generating spurious credibility for propaganda designed to drag the United States into military action on behalf of the State of Israel.”

Holocaust Propaganda Deliberately Used to Cause War

By Hadding Scott
Published: 2017-06-30

The website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a page about the conflict in Syria where, it declares:

“Seven decades after the Holocaust and despite promises of Never Again, a regime is targeting its own people while the international community stands by.” (USHMM, Syria: Introduction)

The same message was elaborated during a ceremony staged by the USHMM in the U.S. Capitol on 25 April 2017, where the Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer complained at length about the “indifference” of the United States and other countries to the alleged suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.

This was the prelude to praising President Donald Trump for having launched a missile strike against Syria on 6 April:

“The exceptions have been like the one that President Trump made this month to respond to a chemical attack by the Assad regime against innocent men, women and children. That decision was a defiance of indifference.” (CSPAN)

Thus it turns out that one of the famous lessons of the Holocaust, which we are all obliged to heed, is that we must not be “indifferent,” and that a good way to show that we are not indifferent is to attack Syria.

For Dermer, of course, there is a political interest in harming Syria, as a longtime adversary of the State of Israel.

For non-Zionists, however, a good reason for “indifference” to the accusations against Bashar al-Assad is that the alternative to Assad, even if every horror story about him were true, is clearly worse.

Assad’s opponents include men who are notorious for eating the liver of their slain opponents, destroying important ancient cultural monuments, enslaving non-Muslim women, and committing mass murders based on religious sectarianism.

Given that such atrocities of the anti-Assad forces have been widely publicized for several years, the USHMM’s narrative can hardly omit to mention them, but nonetheless treats them as relatively unimportant, emphasizing the accusations against Assad.

It is like acknowledging the brutality of Stalin’s government only to assert that Hitler’s deeds are worse. That is however a point of contention.

Aetiology of the Conflict

This is how the USHMM describes the start of the conflict in the Syrian town of Deraa:

“Beginning in March 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring, Syrians staged mass demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad, demanding democratic reforms. The regime reacted with lethal violence, which provoked an armed response, and by mid-2012 the country was in the midst of a full-scale civil war.” (USHMM, Syria: Introduction)

The USHMM blames Assad for creating the religious-sectarian conflict that we now see:

“It has since taken on sectarian dimensions, and civilians have been targeted for atrocities based on their religious affiliation.

“President Assad intentionally sought this transformation to justify his continued hold on power by playing to the religious minorities’ fear of persecution should the Sunni majority take power.” (USHMM, From a Democratic Uprising to a Full-Scale War)

So, the USHMM would have us believe that what happened at Deraa in March 2011, at the beginning of the current anti-Assad violence, was an entirely spontaneous homegrown protest without any religious motive, and that there would have been no violence without provocation from the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Furthermore, we are supposed to believe that the secular government of Bashar al-Assad has somehow caused the sectarian nature of the conflict.

It is, on its face, unreasonable to blame Assad for the religious extremism of his enemies. Some religious-extremist element will exist whether Assad wishes it or not. But more importantly, the fostering of religious extremism has long been a tool of Zionist and U.S. strategy in the Muslim World.

An early example of this (in the 1980s) was the aggregation and enabling of the Mujahedeen to overthrow the (pro-Soviet) secular government of Afghanistan.

Support for religious extremists is an obvious way to create problems for secular Arab Nationalist states (like Syria) that happen to be enemies of the State of Israel.

Within the State of Israel, the Israeli government fostered the growth of Hamas, granting registered-charity status to that organization under its original name, al-Mujama, in 1978 (Barry M. Rubin, Guide to Islamist Movements), with the result that Palestinians became divided between nationalist and Islamist movements.

In Libya, the beneficent secular government of Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown (with enormous outside assistance) by religious maniacs.

Religious extremism was such a common feature of the “Arab Spring” when the disturbances against Assad began that it takes enormous chutzpah for the USHMM to suggest that Bashar al-Assad had deliberately caused this in Syria.

There is another version of the beginning of the conflict, completely different from the USHMM’s account, presented by Steven Sahiounie in the American Herald Tribune of 10 August 2016.

According to Sahiounie, Religious fanatics from Libya who had participated in the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi were brought to Deraa, and were supplied with weapons by the CIA.

The essentially foreign project of subversion was given a Syrian face with the cooperation of local Salafists.

Thus, as Sahiounie tells the story, the anti-Assad movement was imbued with a religious-sectarianist motive and populated with Libyan foreign fighters and sponsored by foreign powers (especially the United States) from the start.

Rick Sterling, writing for Counterpunch, also indicates that the anti-Assad movement was never nonviolent:

“In the first protests in Deraa seven police were killed. Two weeks later there was a massacre of 60 security forces in Deraa.

In Homs, an eye-witness recounted the situation: ‘From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.’

In the first two months, hundreds of police and security forces were killed.” (R. Sterling, Counterpunch, 6 September 2016)

It is completely believable that an attempt to engineer the overthrow of President Assad was organized from abroad, because this is what had happened only a short time earlier in Libya, where the secular government was overthrown by religious fanatics (S. Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, 30 March 2011) but with the role of the United States being so pivotal that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could take credit for the overthrow and even the murder of Qaddafi, declaring:

“We came, we saw, he died!”

It is interesting how the USHMM, while admitting that foreign governments have meddled in Syria, avoids naming them. It admits:

“the efforts of foreign governments to affect the outcome of the Syrian conflict have contributed to the escalation and increasingly sectarian nature of the violence.” (USHMM, The Failure of International Policies)

And here is an even more remarkable circumlocution:

“… [G]overnments in the region, hoping to curtail Iranian influence in the Middle East through regime change in Iran’s most important client state, have permitted or supported the arming and funding of extremist jihadi groups and their infiltration into Syria.” (ibid.)

The preeminent “foreign government” that has been “hoping to curtail Iranian influence” and hoping to eliminate the Syrian state (which supports Hezbollah, the militia that humiliated Israeli forces in two wars) is the State of Israel, which has indeed been giving material assistance to religious extremists in Syria, specifically al-Nusra.

But the USHMM does not name the governments that support the anti-Assad forces, and thus avoids mentioning that Israel is one of them. This is a fact that would cast the entire conflict into a different light, and of course draw attention to the USHMM’s role as a disseminator of Zionist propaganda.

The USHMM’s account of how the Syrian turmoil began as an innocent protest, and supposedly only later turned into an insurrection of religious fanatics – supposedly because Assad wanted it that way – is not very credible.

It was from the beginning a religious conflict instigated and supported from abroad, for the obvious purpose of enhancing the security of the State of Israel by continuing the process of regime-change that took a big step forward with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

USHMM’s Biased Account of Warfare in Syria

The USHMM represents the Battle of Aleppo in terms of suffering inflicted by Assad’s forces:

“In the summer of 2016, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stepped up its attacks on rebel forces and Syrian civilians, this time besieging the ancient city of Aleppo.

“In Syria’s largest city, territory had been divided between government control in the west and opposition control in the east. The government surrounded the eastern part of the city, indiscriminately bombing the residents and systematically blocking delivery of food and medical supplies.” (USHMM, #SaveSyria)

The USHMM also presents a three-minute video about Aleppo that declares:
“For the last five years, Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s regime has systematically tortured and killed civilians under the guise of targeting opposition fighters.” (ibid.)

Since Assad’s government had a very specific goal in Aleppo – to recapture the city – it seems highly unlikely that they deliberately attacked Syrian civilians.

Such a waste of munitions would have served no purpose, indeed would only have generated sympathy for the anti-Assad forces. (Assad says this in his interview with Yahoo News on 10 February 2017.)

The fact that the Syrian government uses “barrel bombs” – described and shown in the USHMM’s video as a high-explosive munition dropped on a parachute from a helicopter – is no proof that civilians injured by these bombs were intended targets.

In fact, the way “barrel bombs” are delivered – slowly descending from a relatively high altitude and highly visible because of the parachute – seems calculated to give civilians a chance to escape the blast.

(Certainly, without the parachute, escape would be more difficult.) A physician who speaks in the USHMM’s video, Mohammed Sahloul, even mentions that running for cover is an option.

The impossibility of totally avoiding harm to Syrian civilians under the conditions of that war was recently declared by Secretary of Defense James Mattis, fending off complaints about civilian deaths that American forces had caused while attacking ISIS:

“civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation.” (quoted by D. Wood, Huffington Post, 13 June 2017)

If James Mattis says that civilian casualties are a fact of life for the most sophisticated armed forces in the world in that kind of situation, then they are certainly unavoidable for the armed forces of Syria in the same situation.

During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, unintended civilian deaths were called “collateral damage.”

Misrepresentation of collateral damage as the intended targets of German bombing during the Second World War was an important element of Anglo-American propaganda. It seems that everyone should have grown wise to this kind of propaganda by now.

The Malignant Influence of Elie Wiesel

Peace-Prize winner Elie Wiesel may have been the first to use the Holocaust to try to push the United States into a war in Syria.

President Barack Obama was present for the USHMM’s “Days of Remembrance” ceremony in April 2012, discussing his administration’s policies regarding Syria and Iran. (L. Rennert, American Thinker, 23 April 2012).

Wiesel used the occasion to humiliate Obama for inaction, in effect calling for war against Syria.

Wiesel compared the USA’s inaction against Assad in Syria (and Ahmadinejad in Iran) to the USA’s earlier hesitation to get involved in the Second World War – a hesitation that is supposed to have allowed the Holocaust to happen.

“It could have been prevented. The greatest tragedy in history could have been prevented had the civilized world spoken up, taken measures in 1939, ‘40, ‘41, ‘42. Each time, in Berlin, Goebbels and the others always wanted to see what would be the reaction in Washington and London and Rome, and there was no reaction so they felt they could continue.”

“So in this place we may ask: Have we learned anything from it? If so, how is it that Assad is still in power? How is it that the No. 1 Holocaust denier Ahmadinejad is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Jewish state.” (quoted by J. Rogin, Foreign Policy, 23 April 2012)

This is of course the form of warmongering rhetoric now employed by the USHMM and by Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer.

Wiesel also wrote an op-ed about US foreign policy toward Syria that appeared in the Washington Post of 8 June 2012. Formally, Wiesel dismissed the possibility of going to war, not because it was undesirable but “Because the American people are tired of waging distant wars.”

Wiesel recommended, instead, a course of action that would very likely lead indirectly to war:

“Why not warn Assad that, unless he stops the murderous policy he is engaged in, he will be arrested and brought to the international criminal court in the Hague and charged with committing crimes against humanity?” (E. Wiesel, Washington Post, 8 June 2012)

In other words, Wiesel suggested issuing an ultimatum. The problem is that an ultimatum requires action if there is an appearance that it has been ignored. Thus it is a backdoor to war. The “red line” enunciated by Obama on 20 August 2012 resembles the course of action that Wiesel had urged.

On 28 September 2014, forty rabbis sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi in support of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act (HR 5732), stating:

“Our teacher Elie Wiesel taught us that wherever there is suffering, that is the center of the world…. Syria is the center of the world today. Each day, we open our newspapers to see distressing images of more wailing and injured children in the city of Aleppo, which is now experiencing the worst air attacks of the entire Syrian conflict.”

This “Protection Act” represented another indirect path to war.

Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, was at the time held by Jabhat al-Nusra, which (according to UN observers) receives assistance from the State of Israel (B. Ravid, Ha’aretz, 7 December 2014) and the Syrian government at the time happened to be attempting to recapture the city.

Thus, these forty rabbis, as they invoked the name of Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust, seem to have been trying to mobilize assistance for a proxy of the State of Israel.

In the last weeks of the Obama administration, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, was due to speak at a memorial service for Elie Wiesel at the USHMM.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (noteworthy for his connection to pop singer Michael Jackson) used the name of Elie Wiesel to try to shame her into advocating military action against the government of Syria:

“She should speak about the appalling American failure in Syria and how the nations of the world must stop the carnage and slaughter. She should express her unending friendship with Israel and the Jewish people and publicly condemn the despicable government of Iran for daring to even threaten a second Holocaust….

“And if she feels uncomfortable, in the last few weeks of her ambassadorship, speaking truth to power, then she should consider doing the right thing by removing herself from the Elie Wiesel Memorial Lecture and allowing someone else to take her place.” (S. Boteach, Jerusalem Post, 21 November 2016)

After the gassing incident of April 2017, a letter from ninety rabbis, quoting Elie Wiesel’s advocacy of military intervention and advocating a missile strike, was sent to President Trump. Again, the name of Elie Wiesel was invoked:

“Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said in 2012, ‘the so-called civilized world isn’t even trying to stop the massacre. Its leaders issue statements, but the bloodshed continues. A situation that has lasted 13-odd months is not about to end.’

“The Assad regime will not cease these brutal attacks unless it faces the threat of serious military repercussions such as airstrikes against air bases associated with chemical weapons and suspected storage facilities.” (Forward, 6 April 2017)

The fact that Hillary Clinton had advocated a missile strike against an airbase shortly before Trump’s action has been widely noted, but the source of the idea, these rabbis quoting Elie Wiesel, has been discussed little if at all.

Gassing Accusations

Arab states have sought chemical weapons as a relatively inexpensive way to counter the threat of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

Pressure to give up those “poor man’s nukes” can be created through incessant accusations that such weapons have been used against civilians.

The accusation against Saddam Hussein, that he had “gassed his own people,” was used in precisely this way, and led to Iraq’s being coerced to abandon its chemical weapons (along with any missiles that could reach Israel) in 1991. A similar accusation led to Syria’s semi-voluntary abandonment of chemical weapons in 2014.

But, beyond that, this kind of accusation lays a foundation for Hitler comparisons and invocations of “good versus evil.” This is the standard form of propaganda used to incite wars that have no evident relevance for American interests.

As much as Assad’s enemies would like to accuse him of gassing his own people, it has been problematic for them to do that.

It was on 5 May 2013, several months after Obama drew his “red line,” that Carla del Ponte, a Swiss member of UN observers’ team in Syria, announced that the team had found many instances of the anti-Assad forces’ use of chemical weapons, but no instance of Assad’s government doing so. (Reuters, 5 May 2013)

When an attack on civilians with sarin gas occurred at Ghouta in August 2013, the claim that Assad’s government had done it was pushed hard, but encountered skepticism.

Professor Theodore A. Postol of MIT was an important skeptic toward the anti-Assad narrative about what happened at Ghouta. Seymour Hersh summarized Postol’s position on that gassing incident as follows:

Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally.

He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal.

The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone.

Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual observations’.

He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. (S. Hersh, “Whose Sarin?”, London Review of Books, 19 November 2013)

In summary, Postol says that the rocket used in the 2013 attack at Ghouta was improvised and not from the Syrian arsenal, and that its range would not have allowed it to be fired from pro-Assad territory.

An Israeli-American political scientist named Yossef Bodansky, Director of Research of the International Strategic Studies Association and former Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the US House of Representatives, wrote an article titled “Did the White House Help Plan the Syrian Chemical Attack?” in which he stated:

“There is a growing volume of new evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East — mostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its sponsors and supporters — which makes a very strong case, based on solid circumstantial evidence, that the August 21, 2013, chemical strike in the Damascus suburbs was indeed a pre-meditated provocation by the Syrian opposition.” (Y. Bodansky, Global Research, 1 September 2013)

Bodansky was convinced that Assad had not done the attack. He goes on to suggest that the Obama Administration may have had advance knowledge and may have participated in planning the gas attack at Ghouta, to frame Assad.

Bodansky’s view was publicized by Rush Limbaugh, who, furthermore, informed his audience that the anti-Assad forces were known to possess chemical weapons, and opined that Assad had no motive to launch such an attack (3 September 2013).

According to Theodore Postol, Obama ultimately decided not to attack Syria for crossing his “red line” because Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told him that the case against Assad was “not a slamdunk.” (T. Postol, 11 April 2017)

In other words, the case against Assad was not even as convincing as the case against Saddam Hussein had been in 2003. International support for the attack was also very shaky: the House of Commons surprisingly voted against British participation in a U.S.-led operation that was being contemplated (BBC, 30 August 2013).

In 2017 another gassing incident was blamed on Assad. A few days after President Trump’s administration announced that it had no interest in regime change in Syria, on 4 April, a gassing incident at Khan Sheikhoun was used to pull the United States back into an anti-Assad posture.

Professor Postol says that the physical evidence for the attack is inconsistent with the story that a chemical munition was dropped from the sky by the Syrian airforce. What Postol sees is an improvised sarin-dispersal device: the metal cylinder that is supposed to have delivered the sarin appears to have been ruptured and crushed by an explosive device placed on top of it.

Former U.S. intelligence officer Philip Giraldi is another prominent skeptic. He points out that nearly all the information about the alleged attack comes from sources hostile to Assad (The American Conservative, 25 April 2017).

Tulsi Gabbard, the only Hindu member of the United States Congress, expressed her own reasonable skepticism about Assad’s responsibility for the attack at Khan Sheikhoun, and was immediately isolated as a pariah in the Democratic Party (R. Borosage, The Nation, 12 April 2017).

On the Republican side, Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky offered the self-evident observation that such an attack would not have served any purpose for Assad.

For his candor and integrity, Congressman Massie was treated by CNN’s interviewer as a dangerous nut. (CNN, 5 April 2017)

Skepticism about the false-flag gassing at Khan Sheikhoun has been propagated mostly via blogs and social media, getting very little notice in major news media, with notable exceptions including The Savage Nation on 6 April 2017 (and to some extent on the following day), Deutsche Welle on 6 April 2017, Russia Today on 12 April, the Nation magazine of 19 April, The Telegraph on 11 May (with an essay on the matter by the Russian ambassador to Britain), and Democracy Now on 13 April (when guest Johnathan Steele cited Theodore Postol) and 28 May (when guest Noam Chomsky cited Postol).

Rush Limbaugh, who voiced skepticism about Assad’s culpability in 2013, today seems to suffer amnesia as he dogmatically declares that Assad has been gassing his own people for seven years and retroactively upbraids Obama for not punishing Assad’s violation of the “red line.”

Because of the general blackout on skepticism toward the gassing accusation, it is likely that most Americans have continued to believe that Assad’s government, for no good reason, attacked innocent Syrian civilians with poison gas.

Accusation of an Industrial Killing Center

The preeminent example of an “industrial killing center” (Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair, Harvard U. Press 2014) or “human slaughterhouse” (D. Goldberg, Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 17 February 1956) in the public mind is of course Auschwitz-Birkenau. Now Bashar al-Assad is accused in such terms.

An entirely anonymous and faceless person, known to the public only by the pseudonym Caesar, is supposed to have assembled a portfolio of 55,000 photographs of persons killed while in the custody of the Syrian government.

A report on Caesar’s photos was commissioned by the government of Qatar, which is hostile to Syria, through the British Carter-Ruck law firm, which hired a committee of three former war-crimes prosecutors, Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva QC, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, and Professor David Crane, to compile the report, which was published on 20 January 2014. Most news-media greeted the report credulously.

The State Department arranged for Caesar to come to the United States.

Caesar’s first destination when he arrived in Washington in July 2014 was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where on 28 July he was introduced to a small audience of reporters and researchers by former Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Concealment of Caesar’s identity was maintained during the presentation.

The USHMM arranged an exhibit of Caesar’s photos, called Genocide: The Threat Continues. For this display a mere one dozen images were selected, one might say cherrypicked, from Caesar’s 55 thousand images.

The Russian government’s news channel for foreign audiences, Russia Today, criticized the USHMM’s use of the Holocaust for warmongering against Syria:

“Since its creation after WWII, Israel and friends have been masters at manipulating emotions, endlessly invoking the memory of Hitler’s Germany as a pretext for starting further wars as in the recent Holocaust-themed propaganda against Syria’s government.

“‘The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression,’ Norman Finkelstein tells Yoav Shamir in Defamation, the Israeli filmmaker’s award-winning 2009 documentary on how perceptions of anti-Semitism affect Israeli and US politics. ‘Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust.’

“If you’re looking for evidence in support of Finkelstein’s thesis today, you need look no further than the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibitof images of emaciated and mutilated bodies from contemporary Syria.” (“Using the Holocaust to justify war on Assad,” Russia Today, 30 October 2014)

Beyond merely criticizing how the USHMM used the evidence proffered by “Caesar,” questions about the credibility of that evidence were raised by Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor and by Rick Sterling writing for Counterpunch.

While Murphy found the claim that Assad’s government had killed 11,000 prisoners since 2011 believable per se, he found the source and the nature of this evidence, and the obvious motive behind it, problematic.

First:

“This is a single source report, from an unidentified man….”

Murphy notes that the little that is revealed about Caesar indicates that he is biased. He is related by marriage to a member of the Syrian National Movement, an anti-Assad group.

Caesar has been collaborating with this opponent of Assad since approximately September 2011, which means, not as the result of some disilllusionment that developed in the course of the conflict, but from the first weeks of it.

Murphy notes that the committee that was supposed to validate Caesar’s evidence did not put much time into it. They interviewed him on 12, 13, and 18 of January 2014 and released the report only two days after the last interview.

Murphy notes that the report’s executive summary, the only portion that many people will read, is misleading about the report’s thoroughness, indicating that it is quite thorough when in fact only 835 of the alleged 11,000 persons killed while in custody of the Syrian government were “evaluated in detail.”

Furthermore, while the Caesar Report was compiled by three former war-crimes prosecutors, Murphy does not consider war-crimes prosecutors, as a class, to be especially credible:

“War crimes prosecutors have, unsurprisingly, a bias towards wanting to bolster cases against people they consider war criminals (like Assad or Qaddafi) and so should be treated with caution. They also frequently favor, as a class, humanitarian interventions.”

Murphy called the Caesar Report “a well-timed propaganda exercise funded by Qatar, a regime opponent who has funded rebels fighting Assad who have committed war crimes of their own.” The obvious motive for the report’s release on 20 January 2014 was to influence peace talks sponsored by the UN a few days later.

Sterling indicates that there must be an ulterior motive in the rigorous concealment of the alleged defector’s identity.

He suggests that Caesar’s identity is not being concealed from the Syrian government but from skeptics, since Caesar’s family was no longer in Syria, and the Syrian government could easily determine his identity anyway, if his story were true:

After all, how many military photographers took photos at Tishreen and Military Hospitals during those years and then disappeared? (R. Sterling, Counterpunch, 4 March 2016)

Sterling indicates that the photos actually tend to undermine the accusation against Assad’s government that they are supposed to support.

Human Rights Watch unintentionally laid the foundation for Sterling’s criticism by studying all 55,000 photos and publishing the results. In its report, If the Dead Could Speak (December 2015), HRW reported that 24,568 of the 55,000 images (46%) showed persons who definitely had not been “tortured to death” by Assad’s government as claimed.

Sterling explains:

“On the contrary, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence (HRW pp2-3). Thus, nearly half the photos show the opposite of what was alleged. These photos, never revealed to the public, confirm that the opposition is violent and has killed large numbers of Syrian security forces and civilians.”

HRW “understands” that the remainder were tortured to death, but Sterling is skeptical:

“It seems the military hospital was doing what it had always done: maintaining a photographic and documentary record of the deceased…. While some may have died in detention; the big majority probably died in the conflict zones.

“The accusations by ‘Caesar’, the Carter Ruck report and HRW that these are all victims of ‘death in detention’ or ‘death by torture’ or death in ‘government custody’ are almost certainly false.”

In 2017, Amnesty International has augmented Caesar’s collection of alleged atrocity photos with stories from alleged eyewitnesses (which, as we know from the experience of the Second World War and its aftermath, are not a trustworthy form of evidence, especially when a political agenda is involved). Amnesty International claims:

“As many as 13,000 people have been killed in Saydnaya since 2011, in utmost secrecy. Many other people at Saydnaya have been killed after being repeatedly tortured and systematically deprived of food, water, medicine and medical care.

“The bodies of those who are killed at Saydnaya are taken away by the truckload and buried in mass graves.” (Amnesty International, “End the Horror in Syria’s Torture Prisons”)

When prominent Jewish journalist Michael Isikoff interviewed Assad for Yahoo News in 2017, he brought up Amnesty International’s collection of witness accounts and Caesar’s photos, quoting Amnesty’s characterization of Saydnaya (in a report issued on 10 February 2017) as a “human slaughterhouse.”

Assad’s response included the observation that photographs of unidentified corpses (in the midst of a war) and stories told by alleged witnesses (where a political agenda is being served) do not constitute proof of systematic killing by his government. (Yahoo News, 10 February 2017)

Holocaust Revisionists have been making that point for decades.

* * *

Thus we see that an ostensible museum on the Mall in Washington D.C. is in effect an agency of a foreign power, generating spurious credibility for propaganda designed to drag the United States into military action on behalf of the State of Israel.

We see, furthermore, that this propaganda is quite reckless and does not withstand scrutiny, but is generally saved from scrutiny by the fact that mass media are unwilling to air such scrutiny.

There seems to be a kind of taboo against scrutinizing any atrocity story that has been likened to the Holocaust. That taboo was expressed by journalist Michael Isikoff, who has declared:

“The photos are inconvenient just as initial reports about the Holocaust were, and history does not judge well those who dismissed the latter reports.” (Policy Watch 2391, The Washington Institute, 26 March 2015)

Sputnik News: Moscow Tells CNN to Man Up and Apologize for the ‘Aleppo Boy’ Hoax

Russian Foreign Ministry called upon CNN to apologize for manipulating public opinion by using the image of Syrian boy Omran Daqneesh and to publish a retraction.

The name of Omran Daqneesh became known to the world in August 2016 when some media outlets began circulating footage of a five-year old Syrian child apparently injured in alleged Russian Air Force strike on the rebel-held al-Qaterji neighborhood of Aleppo.

CNN host Christiane Amanpour even presented a photograph of Daqneesh during her October interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, saying that it illustrated “a crime against humanity.”

However, it eventually became apparent that things weren’t exactly the way that CNN claimed they were, as the boy’s father, Mohammad Kheir Daqneesh, told RT correspondents that the militants actually exaggerated the extent of his son’s injuries for the sake of propaganda.

And now, as Daqneesh’s family now lives peacefully in the liberated city of Aleppo, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow expects CNN to apologize and to publish a retraction story.

“We still wait for a reaction from CNN, and we call upon the journalists to admit their mistake and prepare a retraction story. Trust me, we’re not going to let this issue slide,” Zakharova said.

She pointed out that the news agency needs to admit that either it was an honest mistake or a deliberate attempt at public opinion manipulation.

“The lack of a coherent response from the TV channel leads one to believe that it was a conscious and deliberate attempt by CNN journalists to distort reality,” Zakharova remarked.

In 2016 the image of Omran Daqneesh, shell-shocked and covered in ash, was disseminated by a number of Western media outlets as a symbol of Aleppo’s civilian suffering, with some news agencies even accusing Moscow of conducting the airstrike that the boy was allegedly injured in.

You wrote: “Trump meets with Putin tomorrow. I hope Trump’s aides send a chaperone with him.”

Putin can handle Trump like a piece of cake made with matzah meal. Trump’s a pawn of the Jews who fear Putin, and for good reason.

Like I said in the Video above, Putin has CHANGED THE EQUATION in the Middle East and is PREVENTING a “Greater Israel” from expanding.

Putin is supporting, not so much Assad, but the Syrian State, which historically opposes pernicious Zionism. With the Syrian State STILL intact once Assad is gone years to come, it will remain OPPOSED to Zionist expansion and hegemony.

The worms have NO control over Trump, so they create a void that needs to be filled.

This void is their control of the media slamming him on a daily! SO if Trump wages war with North Korea, which the worms want — they will temporary. stop the slamming, while Christ-ian Americans die.

North Korea knows full well the power of the U.S.! North Korea knows and is scared, and is why they are showing U.S. “don’t tread on us - North Koreans”. North Korea is a bastion of brainwashed maniacs, but if we mix it up with them again - China/Putin WILL step in.

Best just to leave them alone - It’s not as bad as the worms make it out to be Trump! Besides, would it be so bad if America was invaded by Russia (Red Dawn scenario) to remove the worms who have a strangle hold on this country — The U.S.A? It would work!

They would fly off to Pisreal, and then Russia could shake our hands and take off back to their communism. One thing is for sure - Evil Jewry is worried, I mean, really worried!

They only feel safe when there’s a distracting war or police action going on and they’re pulling the strings from the shadows.

Don’t they know we all see them?! I think they do, and that’s why it doesn’t work like it used to anymore! JWBD! (JEW WORMS BE DAMNED)!

Maria Theresa, queen of Austria and archduchess of Hungary and Bohemia, was known for her hatred of Jews.

On this day in 1744, she banished them from her kingdom.

On December 18, 1744, Maria Theresa, queen of Austria and archduchess of Hungary and Bohemia, signed an edict ordering the expulsion of all Jews, first from Prague – which they had to depart by the end of January 1745 – and then, by June, from all her hereditary dominions, that is, from Moravia and Bohemia.

Maria Theresa began with a profound hatred of Jews, about whom she would write, in 1777, “I know of no greater plague than this race, which on account of its deceit, usury and avarice is driving my subjects into beggary.”

Additionally, she was prey to rumors that Prague’s Jews had sided with the Prussians, and against her, during the city’s occupation in the summer of 1744, during the course of the War of the Austrian Succession. After the Habsburgs reconquered the city that November, anti-Jewish riots broke out there, with 20 Jews killed and Jewish homes and businesses destroyed.

These facts, combined with pressure on her by Prague’s burghers to subject the city’s Jews to greater restrictions (though not specifically to banish them), may have been behind the decision.

The following day, on December 19, the Jewish leaders of Prague called on members of their community, which was one of Europe’s largest and most important, to begin a campaign of fasting and prayer. At the same time, they sent out appeals for help to their Jewish brethren in Vienna, London, Amsterdam, Venice and Frankfurt, among other places, asking for their intercession at the royal court in Vienna.

They described the suffering that having to leave their homes in the very heart of winter would cause, and suggested trying to have the order postponed rather than canceled altogether. They also asked the recipients to send the letter to additional Jewish centers, so that by early January, word of the threat faced by Prague’s Jews had arrived at dozens of other cities.

Court Jews and business leaders across Europe were pulling all the strings at their disposal to get monarchs, bishops – even the pope – to intercede on behalf of the Prague community. As a result, the queen was inundated with appeals from the king of Denmark, the Ottoman court, the British lord chancellor, the senate of Venice, and many others, all explaining how devastating the expulsion would be, not just for its Jewish victims, but to the welfare of the empire.

As it turned out, however, Maria Theresa was then in the final stages of one of her many pregnancies. She was incommunicado at this point, and by the time the messages reached her, the expulsion had already taken place. What could still be averted, however, was the additional banishment from Bohemia and Moravia.

At the same time, the queen was lobbying to have her husband, Francis Stephen, elected as Holy Roman emperor. As Prof. Shlomo Avineri explained in a 2005 journal article on the subject, three of the European officials who had made appeals on behalf of Prague’s Jews to the queen were among the seven electors who were empowered to choose the new emperor, so Maria Theresa was especially sensitive to their argument. And indeed, the additional expulsion act was canceled.

Four years later, the Jews who had been forced to leave Prague were also permitted to return – though they had to take on the burden of a new “Toleration Tax.”

Avineri points to the breadth and the efficiency of the campaign for Prague’s Jews as signaling a new, modern era in Jewish diplomacy. The fact that so many of the rulers approached for help responded positively, he writes, “suggests by itself how the position of Jews in European society was changing: Even when vulnerable and under threat of expulsion from one city, Jews could still respond by mobilizing an international network of connections based on a deeply felt solidarity.”

The cross that President Trump has to bear, will see his wealth, health, and possibly, his literal life, crumble to dust.

Brother Nathanael has yet again, been ahead of the curve on this, and with Trump’s family neck deep in the Zionist swamp, and his resistance to Jewish interests thwarted, any genuine Christian patriotism he felt as he campaigned, has now been washed out.

To my mind, this meeting with Putin on Friday, and the next six months of his Presidency, will define the next three years. If war is on the cards, the political and democratic machinery will be pointless. We must either do as Jesus said, and not put our hopes and dreams in their hands, or someone must step up, and slice the Serpent’s head off.

Al Masdar News: New US-backed Rebel Group Being Formed to Further American Interests in Syria

BEIRUT, LEBANON (3:00 P.M.) – A new Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebel group is being formed-up in eastern Syria as the regime in Washington, anxious about the success of pro-government forces in central Syria against ISIS, hopes to curtail the efforts of the Damascus government in restoring the country’s sovereignty.

The new militant group – called Fursan Al-Sharqiyah – will be directly trained and supplied by the United States and placed under the operational command of one Colonel Mahmoud Al-Sofi.

The group’s strength in manpower and equipment is unknown and no professional estimates yet exist.

The group is intended to be militarily active in the Syrian regions of Badia Al-Sham and east Qalamoun. Most its fighters will be natives from the Deir Ezzor Governante just as with the personnel make-up of the Jaish Asoud Al-Sharqiyah and Jaish Maghawir Al-Thorah FSA groups (which are also vetted by the US).

It is worth noting that virtually all FSA fighters from the province of Deir Ezzor were, prior to mid-2014, allied with the Jabhat al-Nusra Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist militant group. It was only after significant portions of al-Nusra in eastern Syria merged into ISIS that FSA fighters were expelled from the region.

Since then, the US Department of State appears to have forgotten that these exiled Islamist militants from Deir Ezzor once cooperated with jihadist terror factions.

The stated purpose of Fursan Al-Sharqiyah will be to reach the city of Deir Ezzor and fight both ISIS and pro-government forces.

The creation of this new FSA group stands as yet another testament to Washington’s warped perception of the conflict in Syria whereby it believes that in order to defeat ISIS, forces aligned with the secular government in Damascus must also be destroyed.

AntiMedia: Breaking: US and Russia Agree to Cease-Fire in Syria as Trump, Putin Meet

Germany — Marking the “biggest diplomatic achievement for the U.S. and Russia since Trump took office,” the Associated Press reported Friday that Russia and the United States have agreed to a cease-fire in southwest Syria. [Where the US coalition special forces have been setting up bases such as At Tanf border station, and Israel and the US firing and conducting airstrikes on the SAA.]www.apnews.com/eaa310ccb6e04e0580759d4ce36e778b

The neighboring countries of Jordan and Israel are also part of the agreement, one of the officials said. Those nations have been concerned that the violence taking place in Syria will spill across their borders.

The cease-fire deal is not part of a separate agreement between Russia, Iran, and Turkey to try to establish de-escalation zones in Syria in which fighting would be reduced.

The Jew-owned media hates Trump because he calls them out as “fake” news.

But the media MOSTLY hates Trump because the Jew-owned media (leftist homosexual-pushing owners and journalists) hate Trump’s “white” followers, the “Trumpsters,” the “DEPLORABLES.”

And how can Trump “limit” Jewish power when JEWS run his admin — when Cohn, Mnuchin, KUSHNER, Friedman, Miller (speech writer) are in charge, my boy?

You simply don’t have a clue how Jews work. Not a clue.

It’s almost impossible for a Gentile like you to grasp how Jews operate. Trump is totally JEWED up. You’re looking for change in all the wrong places, my boy. Trump will NOT deliver for you. Nope. For the Jews, yes, but for the Goys, NO.

The very first handshake was with palms vertical, signalling equality in body language.

Trump, who uses handshakes as a weapon in his games of one-upmanship, didn’t play his usual alpha male grab and yank the other person off-balance into Trump’s personal space handshake game with Putin to assert his dominance right off the bat.

Trump did try to assert his dominance more subtly. He invaded Putin’s personal body space and condescendingly patted the underside of Putin’s arm, a dominance gesture, while shaking hands. Putin “shot” right back by congenially but quickly and sharply pointing a finger at Trump without invading Trump’s personal body space: an authoritative gesture. This asserted Putin’s confidence and authority during Trump’s “micro-politics”, and signaled Trump to “stay out of my body space”.

Press Comments After President Trump Met with President Putin At G20 Summit 7/7/2017

Lavrov, Tillerson and two interpreters were also present. The sound isn’t very good. Lavrov is very relaxed in his chair in clips that show him.

Kushner was nowhere to be seen.

The Jewmerican press was as obnoxious as usual after the Presidents’ comments. Someone started to shout out, “Mr President, after you rigged the election…” right at the end.

Trump sat through most of the press statement with his hands steepled but pointing down, on the listener side of the conversation. It shows confidence and a calculated mind, but he’s also in a more cautious posture, with his steepled hands guarding his crotch, and his elbows in close to his sides.

Trump speaks to the camera while addressing Putin, on the other hand Putin speaks to Trump and makes eye contact a number of times.

Trump and Putin shook hands twice during the presser. Both times they shook hands are notable as they conveyed definite dominance/submissiveness after the closed door meeting.

Both times, Trump offers the palm-up hand of submission, while Putin shakes with the palm-down hand of dominance on top of Trump’s.

In terms of Trump’s micro-politics, Putin’s the one in charge after the his and Trump’s first meeting.

What comes across when for the first meet between the two superpower leaders I find fascinating & revealing.

Trump very aware of his treasonous allegiance attempts to browbeat all present with unconvincing rhetoric.

Can’t you just picture these two as ten year olds in the primary school playground?

Trump,the brash bully bigger than most in his year, with his mates willing & able to push classmates around, except when he comes up against a similar sized lad a year or two up from him, you can picture him melt away from such encounters. As for loyalty/sincerity — well, three marriages umpteen debtors, broken pledges…..

He as a ten year old, quite the opposite, a loner, sensitive, one who avoided confrontation, though all present in the play ground knew Vladimir should not be double crossed or `picked on` for their own good.

It looks like the Jews and Trump might be successful in politically taking over Syria because Russia and China don’t want to get bogged down in Syria in an endless conflict with the U.S. and Isis (Israeli Secret Intelligence Service) .

The fire works begins when the Jews and Trump try to neutralize Iran. The Persian empire has never been defeated and they have plenty of Russian weapons. The Russians and Chinese will come to their aid.

China and its Asian allies will side with Russia and avoid the Jew influence.

Somehow, I can’t seem to get my ministry off the ground given low numbers of donations and lost benefactors (I used to have many very large benefactors who sent large donations regularly that I could count on but over the years they have dwindled down to about two.)

I’m sending out more Appeals than ever but getting diminishing returns. Appeals go out to over 600 readers and viewers but only 4 or 5 respond.

I’m really at the end of my rope and wonder how in the world I’m going to be able to continue.

The ban by PayPISS was a huge blow. I lost over 100 regular monthly-donators whose donations came in automatically every month. Only about 5 of them have come over to Click and Pledge. As regards Patreon, it’s a HUGE failure. This last Video got ONE pledge for $1 and the former Video got ZERO pledges.

I’m now in debt to Credit Cards and have reached my borrowing limit. The last Card I applied to denied me even $500.

Do you think the Zionist NWO cabal want Russia and the US to mutually destroy each other via a nuclear or full scale conventional war?

Is that why they keep goading Putin in Syria with all the pro-ISIS, anti-Assad chicanery against Syria’s sovereignty lately?

If Russia and the US nuked each other than would be a lot of dead Euro descended “goys” & they could keep pushing their Holy Land imposter chosen people archetype to promote dispensationalist “End Times” ideas which would let their pal the Anti-Christ come to power by telling the World through their various propaganda outlets:

“See we told you it would all come down to this one day this is why we need our Jewish messiah as leader. Now take your beast grid implant chip and do our Masonic Luciferian false religion with us goy slaves”.

South Front: RUSSIA AND UNITED STATES MAKE NEW CEASEFIRE DEAL OVER SYRIA

Following the yesterday semi-official announcement of a ceasefire agreement in the Syrian south at the end of talks between Russian President Putin and US President Trump, some additional details of the agreement appeared on Saturday.

A US official said the agreement was the result of months of negotiations.

According to US officials, Russia, the United States and Jordan have set the ceasefire terms.

Al-Qaeda [Al-Nusra, aka], Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), may not abide by the agreement or might even even act against it.

From its side, Moscow confirmed that the government of President Bashar al-Assad will fully respect the agreement.

“Russian, American and Jordanian experts … agreed on a memorandum of understanding to create a de-escalation zone” in the regions of Deraa, Quneitra and Suweida, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.

From his side, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the agreement includes Suweida, Quneitra and Daraa.

On the mechanism of implementation of the ceasefire Lavrov said: “At first, security around this de-escalation zone will be guaranteed by the forces and means of the Russian military police, in coordination with the Americans and Jordanians”.

However, US officials have said no ceasefire monitoring mechanism has been agreed upon so far.

The Arab and Israeli media reported that the agreement includes a buffer zone on the Golan front with a width of 30 km supervised by the Russian Military Police, with the withdrawal of some Syrian Arab Army (SAA) allies from the area such as Hezbollah and Iran.

However, these claims have not been confirmed by any official sources so far.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said yesterday that the United States doesn’t see a future for President Assad and his family in Syria.

It’s believed that the United States is again trying to exploit another agreement with Russia to achieve its agenda in Syria.

I like Tucker Carlson a lot, a true “paleo”conservative and he brings the antidote of sanity to otherwise war hawk Fox News.

This is excellent interview with Prof. Stephen F. Cohen, who cuts right to the chase as to what was really accomplished at the summit between Putina and Trump. Both Cohen and Tucker are committed to intellectual, academic, and journalistic honesty. Professor Cohen makes some extraordinary remarks.

Tucker says at the end, “Thanks for the common sense, Professor”. Tucker has had Professor Cohen on his Fox News show several times.

Professor Cohen belongs more or less to the progressive camp. But when it comes to criticizing neocons (and Obama and the neoliberal hawks for that matter for his own weak-kneed stupidity and failures to build better relations with Russia) and debunking Cold War mentality and propaganda, his breadth of knowledge of Russian history and politics, and his constant support for building a new détente between America and Russia, the man always makes sense.

He’s fluent in Russian and so he can go to the original sources before the Mainstream Media spins it out of control one way or the other.

And don’t be put off by the fact that he’s ethnically Jewish American. He was born and raised in a small Kentucky town on the Ohio River in the 1930s where there weren’t even enough adult Jewish men to found a synagogue. He has little, if any, in the way of a “Jewish agenda,” and seems to be a secular “apostate” Jew. Academic and political honesty and integrity matter much more to him.

Israel opposes the Russian army’s supervision of safe zones which have been established along the Syrian border.

As part of peace talks to end the conflict in Syria, safe zones have been establish along Syria’s border with Turkey, Jordan and Israel. The latter has objected to the role Turkey and Iran have played in determining where the safe zones should be.

Haaretz newspaper reported that a senior US envoy visited Israel two weeks ago and met with senior security, army and foreign ministry officers in order to discuss the possibility of establishing safe zones on the Syrian-Israeli border and in the liberated part of the Syrian Golan Heights.

The newspaper also mentioned that the idea of ​​establishing safe zones throughout Syria surfaced after US President Donald Trump took office this year, and that the White House and the Kremlin have supported this solution as one of the possibilities to ending the Syrian crisis.

Israel has made a number of demands, Haaretz reported, including that negotiations on the safe area on its borders be separate from the talks taking place in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, in which both Turkey and Iran take an active role in.

It demanded that these two countries have no role in determining the safe zones in southern Syria.

According to the newspaper, the US administration has adopted the Israeli position and has therefore held separate talks with Russia and Jordan.

Israel has demanded also that the safe zones along the border with Syria should be used to eradicate Iran, Hezbollah and “Shia militias” from the Israeli border and from the Jordanian border.

The third demand was that Israel should distance itself from the ongoing war in Syria and should not be dragged into it by taking an active role in the safe zones, whether in terms of monitoring, supervising or preserving security.

An Israeli officer told the newspaper that Russia had proposed that its army control the safe zones in southern Syria but Tel Aviv made it clear to the Americans that it opposes that and prefers US supervision.

An American diplomat said that appointing Mohammed Bin Salman as crown prince of Saudi Arabia was like a “dream come true for Israel”, Haaretz reported.

The former US Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, said that the appointment of Bin Salman opens an unprecedented opportunity for Israel to improve its regional position and supports it in facing its strategic and security challenges.

Shapiro restated the fact that Bin Salman sees a link between Saudi Arabia and Israel’s interests and threats which will allow Tel Aviv to benefit.

Bin Salman’s hatred of groups, specifically the Muslim Brotherhood [which politically opposes monarchies, as does Al Qaeda and ISIS, but religiously spring from the same Saudi Wahabi/Salafi ideologies], and his efforts to confront Iran led him to certain regional alliances, the former US envoy said.

It is for this reason that Bin Salman has built strong relations with both the UAE and Egypt.

“This development could lead to the formation of an axis that includes the United States, the Sunni Arab states and Israel since they share common strategic interests and are prepared to confront extremist forces in the region,” he added.

Shapiro, who has also served as an adviser to President Barack Obama on Gulf affairs, urged both Riyadh and Tel Aviv to “use a wise diplomacy in order to achieve greater returns regarding the relationship between the two sides and reduce the damage that could result from the political reality in the region.”

Read more: The Saudi war of words on Qatar

Bin Salman will be ready for a complete normalisation with Israel within the framework of the implementation of the Arab Initiative, Shapiro explained.

Former Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef “is known for being a reliable and trusted partner of the United States in its war on terror,” Shapiro explained, adding that his problem is that he is “a hesitant conservative who cannot adopt real social and economic reforms.”

Saudi should however be careful and not allow the new crown prince to drag it into unnecessary regional conflicts. Shapiro warned that the policies of Bin Salman may harm “American interests”, saying that the escalation of the crisis with Qatar “has already caused damage to Washington”.

Saudi Official To CFR: Relations with Israel Will Be Based on Mutual Interests

Saudi Arabia will normalise its relations with Israel if the latter accepts the Arab Initiative, the Director of the Middle East Centre for Strategic and Legal Studies, Anwar Eshki, has said.

In an interview with the German channel Deutsche Welle, the former general in the Saudi armed forces, said:

“The normalisation of relations with Israel depends on their approval of the Arab Initiative which was launched in 2002 by King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz with the aim of achieving peace in the Middle East and between Israel and Palestine, establishing an internationally recognised Palestinian state in 1967 and guaranteeing the return of refugees and Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights.”

After the peace and normalisation processes, relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel will be established based on common interests and reciprocity.

He added that once the islands of Tiran and Sanafir are handed to Saudi Arabia by Egypt, the Kingdom will recognise the Camp David Accords.

“The aim behind restoring the two islands to Saudi Arabia was not to establish relations between the Kingdom and Israel but to demarcate the borders with Egypt.”

“When the borders were drawn, the two islands became part of the Kingdom’s borders. Thus, the Kingdom will have to deal with the Camp David Accords.

“The Accords are no longer Egyptian-Israeli only, but have become international. Egypt and Saudi Arabia will jointly control the route that Israeli, Jordanian and other ships pass through.”

Eshki added: “As far as I know, the Kingdom will go towards normalising relations with Israel after the implementation of the Arab Initiative.

“The Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu also proposed an initiative, which is slightly different from the Arab one and is now being studied in the United States. After that, we will examine it and if our Palestinian brothers agree on it, the Kingdom will not object.”

Eshki pointed out that the difference between the two initiatives is that “Israel would allow a Palestinian state on the condition that it is a confederation and is backed by Jordan and Egypt as its guarantors.

“In addition, the Israeli proposal would leave Jerusalem as the final issue to be resolved. This is what I know of the initiative.”

He added: “If the Kingdom normalises relations with Israel, all Muslim countries will do the same and break Israel’s isolation from other countries in the region. Israel has not carried out a single act of aggression against the Kingdom.”

Asked whether this Saudi rapprochement with Israel is due to the existence of a joint enemy – the Iranian regime – Eshki declared: “This is not an agreement but a circumstantial situation. The circumstances have imposed this on us. The hostility to Iran has two angles – an Israeli angle and a Saudi angle.”

President of Russia Vladimir Putin answered journalists’ questions on the results of the two-day G20 Summit.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon,

Allow me to skip any statements and monologues. You have seen and heard everything, a great deal. Let us get straight to questions.

Go ahead, please.

Question: Mr President, both experts and ordinary people, some of whom are rampaging near this building now, are known to have different opinions on the usefulness of G20 summits.

At this summit, for example, there was more talk about your meeting with Mr Trump. And yet which of the issues discussed by the G20 is most relevant for Russia? Thank you.

Vladimir Putin: G20 is primarily an economic forum, even though many political and similar issues emerge. Nevertheless, the main issue is the development of the global economy, and this is what received the greatest attention.

We agreed on determining global economy sustainability principles, and this is vitally important for working along the same standards.

[When Putin says “global economy,” he doesn’t mean it in the sense of DC’s New World Order or Pax Jewmerica, but simply a different way of saying world economy.

He means the economy of the world, considered as the international exchange of goods and services that is expressed in monetary units of account (money). Rather than a uni-polar global hegemony, Putin sees a “multi-polar” world economic system of independent nations working in concert with each other.

Putin much prefers to keep economics apart from politics as much as possible, especially the carrot-stick variety which Jewmerica is so addicted to. — Kj]

Then we continued with the issue which in fact had been launched in St Petersburg: money laundering and everything connected with tax havens and tax evasion. It is a crucial matter with practical implications.

Next, no less important and also connected with the economy, a related but very important issue – the fight against terror, tracking money flows to prevent the funding of terrorism.

Finally, a very big and very sensitive issue is climate change. I think in this respect the Federal Republic of Germany chairing the G20 has managed to reach the best compromise in a difficult situation the chairing nation has found itself in, namely due to the US quitting the Paris Climate Agreement.

An agreement was reached, a compromise, when all the countries have recorded that the United States pulled out of the agreement but they are ready to continue cooperating in certain areas and with certain countries on addressing climate change challenges. I think this is a positive result in itself, which can be credited to Chancellor Merkel.

There are other issues we looked into. For example, digital economy. Here we proposed adopting common rules in the area of digital economy, defining cyber security and designing a comprehensive system of behaviour rules in this sphere.

We said today – the President of the South African Republic spoke very convincingly about it; in fact, this issue was touched upon in practically everyone’s speech and in some way it is reflected in the final documents – that we must be ready for the release of the labour force, we must make joint efforts, we must figure out what should be done with the workers who have lost their jobs, how to arrange retraining, what the deadlines are and what rules should be put in place.

Among other things I drew attention to the fact that trade unions will have to be engaged because they will protect not only the workers but also the self-employed individuals operating in the digital economy, and the number of such jobs is increasing.

This is connected in one way or another with women’s rights and education for girls. This is being discussed at many forums but we talked about it today in the context of digital economy.

Overall, this forum is definitely effective, and I believe it will play a role in stabilising the global economy in general.

Question: Mr President, I would like to follow up on my colleague’s topic. Even though there were many political issues at the summit, they keep on surfacing at the G20 summits more and more often, yet you listed economic issues, which remain the priority anyway.

Many speakers, ministers from different countries responsible for the economy, said that 2017 could become the year of global economic growth.

How feasible is that and will this growth be seen in Russia in view of the current unfavourable trends – sanctions, restrictions and other factors?

Vladimir Putin: We have not seen any unfavourable trends so far, or they have almost disappeared at any rate.

Certain factors are having a negative impact on economic development, including in the global economy, the economy in the Euro zone and in Russia, those same illegitimate restrictions you have mentioned.

We call for lifting any restrictions, for free trade, for working within the World Trade Organisation, in line the WTO rules.

By the way, one of the topics discussed here was free trade and countering protectionism. This is also one of the crucial areas that should be mentioned.

On the whole, there is some progress. However, the initial optimistic growth forecasts have been downgraded. Nevertheless, there is growth, and it is apparent, including in Russia.

I said recently and repeated it here that Russian economic growth is tangible, the Russian economy, and we can say this with certainty, has recovered from the recession.

We have been growing for the third quarter in a row, and soon it will be the fourth quarter in a row. Growth exceeded 3 percent in May: it was 3.1 percent. I think we will have an average of 2 percent in 2017. This is also a significant contribution to the global economic growth.

Let me remind you that we also have low unemployment of 5.2 percent, our reserves are growing, including the reserves of the Central Bank and the Government. The Central Bank reserves have already reached $412 billion.

The federal budget revenues grew by 40 percent, and all this is happening against the background of fairly low inflation of 4.4 percent.

All this taken together certainly gives us optimism; however, one cannot say with certainty that this is a long-term trend. We must take care to sustain this growth trend. I have every reason to believe that we will manage to do it.

[Russians secretly pray for more sanctions in order to MRGA — Make Russia Great Again.

Sanctions have forced Russia to jump-start old and new industries rather than depend on imports. Particularly successful has been the agriculture sector and Russia’s food security becomes stronger every day. — KathJ]

Question: Mr President, your meeting with President Trump was literally the focus of everyone’s attention at the summit. How do you access [assess] the results of this meeting?

It is no secret that US President had voiced a rather tough rhetoric in Poland, and there had even been unfriendly statements from US media in the run-up to the summit.

Did Mr Trump ask you directly about Russia’s interference in the US [presidential] election? Did you like him personally? Do you think you will get along?

Vladimir Putin: The US President asked me this question directly, and we discussed it. And this was not a single question, there were many, and he gave much attention to this issue.

Russia’s stance is well-known and I reiterated it. There is no reason to believe that Russia interfered in the US election process.

But what is important is that we have agreed that there should not be any uncertainty in this sphere, especially in the future. By the way, I mentioned at the latest summit session that this directly concerns cyberspace, web resources and so on.

The US President and I have agreed to establish a working group and make joint efforts to monitor security in the cyberspace, ensure full compliance with international laws in this area, and to prevent interference in countries’ internal affairs.

Primarily this concerns Russia and the United States. We believe that if we succeed in organising this work – and I have no doubt that we will – there will be no more speculation over this matter.

As regards personal relations, I believe that they have been established.

This is how I see it: Mr Trump’s television image is very different from the real person; he is a very down to earth and direct person, and he has an absolutely adequate attitude towards the person he is talking with; he analyses things pretty fast and answers the questions he is asked or new ones that arise in the course of the discussion.

So I think that if we build our relations in the vein of our yesterday’s meeting, there are good reasons to believe that we will be able to revive, at least partially, the level of interaction that we need.

Question: To follow up on of your answer, could you please say if President Trump has accepted your denial of Russia’s involvement, Russia’s interference in the US election?

Vladimir Putin: I repeat, he asked many question on this matter. I answered all of his questions as far as I could. I think he took note and agreed. But it would be better if you asked him about what he thinks about it.

Question: One more question about the domestic policy, if I may. Actually, it is unrelated to the G20 but the question is about Russia’s domestic policy.

I would like to ask what you think of Alexei Navalny and his activities. And why you do not say his name and surname when you answer questions about him.

Vladimir Putin: I think we can engage in dialogue, especially at the level of the President or the Government, with the people who propose a constructive agenda, even if they voice criticism. But if the point is to attract publicity, this does not encourage dialogue.

Question: Earlier this morning you had a meeting with the French President and the German Chancellor.

I assume you had an in-depth discussion on the situation in Ukraine. Did a new vision emerge, and is there any hope that Donbass will come out of the ordeal gripping it right now?

Can the discussion of the issue launched with the US President play its role, or do the interests of Russia and the United States still diverge in Ukraine, or may be even oppose each other in some matters?

Which, by the way, can be presumed from the background of the US diplomat who was appointed special envoy.

Vladimir Putin: The interests of Russia and Ukraine, the interests of the Russian and Ukraine people – and I am fully and profoundly confident of this – coincide. Our interests fully coincide.

The only thing that does not coincide is the interests of the current Ukrainian authorities and some of Ukraine’s political circles.

If we are to be objective, of course, both Ukraine and Russia are interested in cooperating with each other, joining their competitive advantages and developing their economies just because we have inherited much from the Soviet era – I am speaking about cooperation, the unified infrastructure and the energy industry, transport, and so on.

But regrettably, today our Ukrainian colleagues believe this can be neglected. They have only one ”product“ left – Russophobia, and they are selling it successfully.

Another thing they are selling is the policy of dividing Russia and Ukraine and pulling the two peoples and two nations apart. Some in the West like this; they believe that Russia and Ukraine must not be allowed to get closer in any areas.

That is why the current Ukrainian authorities are making active and successful efforts to sell this ”product.“

But I think this will eventually come to an end. Russia, at any rate, wants for this situation to be over as soon as possible.

As regards the United States’ involvement in settling the situation in Ukraine, President Trump and I have talked about this and we agreed – and actually, this has already been done – that a special representative of the administration would be appointed to handle this issue on a permanent basis and to be in constant contact both with Russia and Ukraine, with all the parties interested in settling this conflict.

Question: Mr President, I have a question about the Middle East, which is seething at the moment: Syria, Qatar and other countries. You must have had discussions on Syria at the G20 Summit.

How do you assess the prospects for the Syrian settlement after those discussions and after the recent meeting in Astana? Has the stance of the new US Administration on this issue changed or become more constructive, especially in view of yesterday’s agreements?

And also about Qatar, if I may. How do you assess the situation? Was it discussed at the G20 Summit?

And one more question, if I may…

Vladimir Putin: I will have to make a full report to you. (Laughter.)

Question: Well, one does not often get this chance. On the terrorism issue: as far as I know, agreeing on the Statement on Countering Terrorism was a difficult process. If it is not a secret, what were the major contradictions?

Vladimir Putin: To be honest, I am not aware of the difficulties, you had better ask the Sherpa.

In my view, there were no basic objections from anyone. Maybe some of the wording. But, to be honest, I am not aware of that. I know that the text was agreed on.

At any rate, at the level of delegation heads, heads of state, there were no problems or tensions. Everyone admits that this is a common threat and everyone states their readiness to fight this threat.

As for Qatar, the problem was not discussed. It is a fairly burning regional issue, and can impact certain processes, by the way, including in the economy, in the energy area and in terms of security in the region, but I did not discuss this issue with anybody during the Summit.

About Syria. Yes, we discussed this issue with almost all of my interlocutors. As for whether the US stance has changed or not – I would say it has become more pragmatic.

It does not seem to have changed in general, but there is an understanding now that by combining efforts, we can achieve a lot. Yesterday’s deal on the southern de-escalation zone is clearly the result of this change.

You know, others may react as they like, but I can tell you, this is one of the breakthroughs we have made in our work with President Trump. This is a real result of cooperation, including with the United States.

Jordan has joined in the effort, and so have several other countries in the region. We have held consultations with Israel and will continue them in the near future.

Still, this is a very good result, a breakthrough of a kind. Therefore, if we move the same way in other directions, towards other de-escalation areas…

We have discussed this very thoroughly with the President of Turkey today. This does not entirely depend on us, of course, as much has to do with the controversy between the countries in the region.

Everyone has their own concerns, everyone has their own preferences, their own interests, I mean legitimate interests, so this is the way we must treat these – as their legitimate interests; we need to look for compromises.

You know, sometimes we find them. In any case, the fact that active military operations have ceased, the fact that we are now discussing de-escalation zones is a huge step forward.

Now we need to agree on the exact boundaries of these zones, and how security will be ensured there. This is a painstaking, even tedious effort, and it is extremely important and responsible work.

Based on the recent positive experience [at Astana], relying on the good will of Iran, Turkey, and of course, the Syrian Government and President al-Assad, we can take further steps.

The most important thing is – we have actually reaffirmed this, also in the documents establishing this zone in the south on the border with Jordan, and the area that borders on the Golan Heights – the most important thing is to ensure Syria’s territorial integrity, eventually, so that these de-escalation zones become the prototype of regions that could cooperate with each other and with the official Damascus.

If we manage to do this, we will lay the groundwork, create the prerequisites for resolving the entire Syrian problem by political means.

Question: We have already talked about interfering in the elections but we have new elections coming up in Germany.

Vladimir Putin: Here in Germany?

Question: These days we say “we have elections in Germany” in September. Is Russia planning to interfere in them? Did you notify Angela Merkel about how we are going to do it? Maybe you will give me a hunch as well? (Laughter in the audience.)

Vladimir Putin: You are asking rather provocative questions. But I told you that we had not interfered in the United States either. Why should we make trouble here as well?

We have very good relations with the Federal Republic. It is our largest trade and economic partner in Europe country-wise, one of our leading trade partners in the world.

We have large joint projects on the agenda that we support, for example, Nord Stream 2. There are a lot of tales being told about it, arguments and even resistance but it is absolutely evident that it is in the interests of the European economy and in the interests of the German economy, which wants to abandon nuclear power.

Why would we do it? Interfering in domestic political processes is the last thing we would wish to do.

If you look at the press, the German press or the European press in general, the French press, it is they who keep on interfering in our domestic affairs. But we are not concerned about it because we feel confident.

Question: Thank you very much, Mr President, for the opportunity to ask you a question on behalf of my television network.

We meant to ask you about your meeting with President Trump, but my colleague has already asked the same question. And you said we should ask President Trump about what had happened.

Vladimir Putin: No, I did not. You should ask him about how he sees it, what he thinks about my answers. As to what happened – nothing happened, we did not interfere.

Remark: Unfortunately, the White House offers practically no information about what is going on.

Vladimir Putin: We will give them a piece of our minds. (Laughter.)

Remark: Could you just share what President Trump said during your meeting when you told him that Russia had not interfered in the political process?

Vladimir Putin: He started asking probing questions, he was really interested in some details. I gave him fairly detailed answers as much as I could.

I told him about my dialogues with the previous administration, including with President Obama. But I do not feel that I have the right to give details of my conversations, say, with President Obama, it is not an accepted practice at this level.

I think it would not be quite appropriate of me to give details of our conversation with President Trump. He asked me and I answered him. He asked probing questions, and I offered explanations.

I think he was satisfied with those answers.

Remark: Thank you very much.

Vladimir Putin: You are welcome.

Question: Going back to the issue of boosting economic growth, to the measures that could be taken, the Government has already drafted a plan, and as far as we know, you have read it but for some reason the plan is classified. We know some parts of it from what you said about them.

Vladimir Putin: Let me explain. As you must know, we have several groups working on this issue: a group headed by Mr Titov with the involvement of the business community, and a group headed by Mr Kudrin, who has gathered a large number of respected experts.

The Government is also working. But we should make a plan that will be acceptable, optimal for the next steps to be taken in the economy starting in 2018. And we must review all the proposals, assess them and in the end, make the final decision.

It may not be one of the proposals submitted; it may be something based on all three proposals. But work is currently underway, and we do not talk about it in advance.

But the Government has certainly done a great deal in this area, and we will rely largely on the Government’s proposals. We cannot ignore the results of Mr Kudrin’s work, and Mr Titov also has some sensible suggestions.

This is why we are working at present to decide what the final variant will be out of the proposals for the development of the Russian economy from 2018 onward.

That is all. There are no secrets. What is the point? The point is that it is wrong to announce what has not been adopted yet. We could just send the wrong signals to the economy, and that is it. It all comes down to that.

Question: I have a question about domestic policy. I have learned that you have been briefed on the [limo] car of the Cortege project, which is to be used at the 2018 presidential inauguration.

Vladimir Putin: You seem to know this better than me: this is the first time I have heard about it.

Question: Have you thought of going for a drive in this car at the official event, that is, at the inauguration?

Vladimir Putin: No, I have not, because the car is not ready yet. You can go for a drive in it yourself, I will see how it goes, and later we can test it out together.

Question: You have spoken about the meeting with Mr Erdogan. Could you please elaborate – when you touched upon the issue of the first zone, the northern one, did you discuss the issue of the Kurds and particularly the territory of Afrin, where representatives of the Russian Centre for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides are present?

The Turkish media are already preparing the ground for the Turkish army’s intervention to this area.

Also, did you discuss the future of [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad with Mr Trump and Mr Erdogan? For instance, Mr Tillerson said yesterday that this person has no future in the Syrian politics. He did not say how and when, but that was what he said.

Vladimir Putin: Let me answer the second question first. Mr Tillerson is a well-regarded man, he received the Russian Order of Friendship, and we feel great respect for him and we like him. But he is not a Syrian citizen, and the future of Syria and President al-Assad as a political figure has to be determined by the Syrian people.

As regards the Kurdish issue, this is a very big and complicated problem.

We keep in contact with many Kurdish groups and make no secret of this. But with regard to military support of their activities, here our US colleagues are far ahead of the game; they are making much greater efforts in this regard.

Our servicemen – not advisers – who are monitoring the ceasefire are indeed present in many regions of Syria, where the truce agreement has been reached. But speaking of the regions you have mentioned, there are one or two of them there, they are not military units.

They are performing the task that everyone is interested in fulfilling. But so far, we are not witnessing any preparations for military action; quite the opposite, we expect that our preliminary developments on establishing the de-escalation zones in several regions – in the Idlib area, in the north – will be accomplished. And this cannot be done without Turkey’s support.

Question: My colleagues here have already recalled the words President Trump said in Warsaw. He made yet another statement about the United States being ready to begin direct supplies of liquefied natural gas to Poland and Central Europe.

What do you think of these plans, especially in the context of our plans for the Nord Stream? What if gas becomes a new cause of tension in US-Russian relations?

Vladimir Putin: I view these plans highly positively because healthy competition is good for everyone. We support an open market and healthy competition.

The US President said yesterday during the discussion that the United States stands for open, fair competition. And, by the way, when I spoke, I supported his point.

So, we are absolutely all right with this; if it is so, if there is open and fair competition, no political motives or political resources involved, it would be quite acceptable for us.

Because to date, it is an obvious fact that any specialist would tell you: the cost of production and delivery of liquefied natural gas from the United States is much higher than our LNG – even LNG – and is not even comparable to Russian pipeline gas.

So, there is no doubt that we have an absolute competitive advantage. But to keep it, our market participants must work hard. They need to retain these competitive advantages.

Let us wrap this up. Go ahead, please.

Question: After the first meeting with President Trump, do you think it would be possible to gradually pull Russian-US relations out of deep crisis they are in, or is it difficult to say anything at all yet?

Vladimir Putin: I very much hope so, and it seems to me that we have built certain prerequisites for this.

On Saturday, Iraqi security forces (ISF) liberated the strategic Old Mosul city, the last ISIS stronghold in the city of Mosul, the Iraqi military has declared.

ISF lliberated Nujaifi street, Bab al-Toub and Souk al-Sagha and broke the remaining ISIS defense lines inside the area. At least 35 ISIS members were reportedly killed during their failed attempt to flee Old City.

Brig. Gen. Yahia Rasoul, Iraqi Joint Operations Command Spokesman, said that ISF have captured the entire Old Mosul area adding that this is the end of ISIS in the city.

With the liberation of Old Mosul, the Iraqi government will likely declare that it has a full control over the city. However, the security situation in Mosul remains complicated, many ISIS sleeper cells still operate in the area.

I have a different rationale than the Bro for Van Helsing: This is a charade. It’s to keep the Whites, Deplorables, Trumpsters, or whatever moniker you want off what Trump is really doing.

He is enriching his pals on Wall Street, allowing the criminals in Tel Aviv to build 40,000 units on stolen, militarily occupied Palestinian land, and just announced 800 in Al Quds (Jerusalem).

He’s doing total freewill destruction/bombing/shelling of Syria and Damascus.

He’s stirring possible false flags on Iran via the Straits, and declared war on North Korea by reckless simulated attacks on the north.

CIA agents, Soros agents, NGO agents are all in the -Istan countries on Russia’s underbelly, and there’s the naval disruption in the South China Sea by deploying planes and Navy cruisers close to the Chinese created islands.

Watch what happens when he does attack either Assad, Iran, or North Korea.

They will do as they did when he sent the birds flying onto Shayrat Air Base. They loved it and him!!!

Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream media remains obsessed over Russia’s alleged “meddling” in last fall’s election, but the real test of bilateral cooperation may come on the cease-fire in Syria, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern

The immediate prospect for significant improvement in U.S.-Russia relations now depends on something tangible: Will the forces that sabotaged previous ceasefire agreements in Syria succeed in doing so again, all the better to keep alive the “regime change” dreams of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists?

Or will President Trump succeed where President Obama failed by bringing the U.S. military and intelligence bureaucracies into line behind a cease-fire rather than allowing insubordination to win out?

These are truly life-or-death questions for the Syrian people and could have profound repercussions across Europe, which has been destabilized by the flood of refugees fleeing the horrific violence in the six-year proxy war that has ripped Syria apart.

But you would have little inkling of this important priority from the large page-one headlines Saturday morning in the U.S. mainstream media, which continued its long obsession with the more ephemeral question of whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would confess to the sin of “interference” in the 2016 U.S. election and promise to repent.

Thus, the headlines: “Trump, Putin talk election interference” (Washington Post) and “Trump asks Putin About Meddling During Election” (New York Times). There was also the expected harrumphing from commentators on CNN and MSNBC when Putin dared to deny that Russia had interfered.

In both the big newspapers and on cable news shows, the potential for a ceasefire in southern Syria – set to go into effect on Sunday – got decidedly second billing.

Yet, the key to Putin’s assessment of Donald Trump is whether the U.S. President is strong enough to make the mutually agreed-upon ceasefire stick.

As Putin is well aware, to do so Trump will have to take on the same “deep-state” forces that cheerily scuttled similar agreements in the past. In other words, the actuarial tables for this cease-fire are not good; long life for the agreement will take something just short of a miracle.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will have to face down hardliners in both the Pentagon and CIA.

[The “deep state” who is so against Assad is the unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, The Eastern and Jewish Establishments of political and corporate elites, and their Cold War neocon hawk friends in Washington and the greedy military-industrial complex thrives on a perpetual war economy at the expense of the American people the world’s nations, and the Jewmedia cabal who are relentlessly pushing this criminal policy.

They all deliberately support al Qaeda, ISIS, the numerous militant groups of Syrian opposition misfits given the umbrella term, “FSA,” and the made in Jewmerica fraudulent Syrian “government” in waiting, the so-called Syrian National Council composed of ex-pat Syrians trotted out for the Greater Israel PNAC project of balkanizing Syria. — Kj]

Tillerson probably expects that Defense Secretary James “Mad-Dog” Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo will cooperate by ordering their troops and operatives inside Syria to restrain the U.S.-backed “moderate rebels.” But it remains to be seen if Mattis and Pompeo can control the forces their agencies have unleashed in Syria.

If recent history is any guide, it would be folly to rule out another “accidental” U.S. bombing of Syrian government troops or a well-publicized “chemical attack” or some other senseless “war crime” that social media and mainstream media will immediately blame on President Bashar al-Assad.

Bitter Experience

Last fall’s limited ceasefire in Syria, painstakingly worked out over 11 months by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and approved personally by Presidents Obama and Putin, lasted only five days (from Sept. 12-17) before it was scuttled by “coalition” air strikes on well-known, fixed Syrian army positions, which killed between 64 and 84 Syrian troops and wounded about 100 others.

In public remarks bordering on the insubordinate, senior Pentagon officials a few days before the air attack on Sept. 17, showed unusually open skepticism regarding key aspects of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement – like sharing intelligence with the Russians (an important provision of the deal approved by both Obama and Putin).

The Pentagon’s resistance and the “accidental” bombing of Syrian troops brought these uncharacteristically blunt words from Foreign Minister Lavrov on Russian TV on Sept. 26:

“My good friend John Kerry … is under fierce criticism from the U.S. military machine. Despite the fact that, as always, [they] made assurances that the U.S. Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama, supported him in his contacts with Russia … apparently the military does not really listen to the Commander in Chief.”

Lavrov specifically criticized Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Gen. Joseph Dunford for telling Congress that he opposed sharing intelligence with Russia despite the fact, as Lavrov put it, “the agreements concluded on direct orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama [who] stipulated that they would share intelligence.”

Noting this resistance inside the U.S. military bureaucracy, Lavrov added, “It is difficult to work with such partners.”

Putin picked up on the theme of insubordination in an Oct. 27 speech at the Valdai International Discussion Club, in which he openly lamented:

“My personal agreements with the President of the United States have not produced results. … people in Washington are ready to do everything possible to prevent these agreements from being implemented in practice.”

On Syria, Putin decried the lack of a “common front against terrorism after such lengthy negotiations, enormous effort, and difficult compromises.”

Lavrov’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, meanwhile, even expressed sympathy for Kerry’s quixotic effort, giving him an “A” for effort.after then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter dispatched U.S. warplanes to provide an early death to the cease-fire so painstakingly worked out by Kerry and Lavrov for almost a year.

For his part, Kerry expressed regret – in words reflecting the hapless hubris befitting the chief envoy of the world’s “only indispensible” country – conceding that he had been unable to “align” all the forces in play.

With the ceasefire in tatters, Kerry publicly complained on Sept. 29, 2016:

“Syria is as complicated as anything I’ve ever seen in public life, in the sense that there are probably about six wars or so going on at the same time – Kurd against Kurd, Kurd against Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sunni, Shia, everybody against ISIL, people against Assad, Nusra [Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate].

“This is as mixed-up sectarian and civil war and strategic and proxies, so it’s very, very difficult to be able to align forces.”

Admitting Deep-State Pre-eminence

Only in December 2016, in an interview with Matt Viser of the Boston Globe, did Kerry admit that his efforts to deal with the Russians had been thwarted by then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter – as well as all those forces he found so difficult to align.

“Unfortunately we had divisions within our own ranks that made the implementation [of the ceasefire agreement] extremely hard to accomplish,” Kerry said. “But it … could have worked. … The fact is we had an agreement with Russia … a joint cooperative effort.

“Now we had people in our government who were bitterly opposed to doing that,” he said. “I regret that. I think that was a mistake. I think you’d have a different situation there conceivably now if we’d been able to do that.”

The Globe’s Viser described Kerry as frustrated. Indeed, it was a tough way for Kerry to end nearly 34 years in public office.

After Friday’s discussions with President Trump, Kremlin eyes will be focused on Secretary of State Tillerson, watching to see if he has better luck than Kerry did in getting Ashton Carter’s successor, James “Mad Dog” Mattis and CIA’s latest captive-director Pompeo into line behind what President Trump wants to do.

As the new U.S.-Russia agreed-upon ceasefire goes into effect on Sunday, Putin will be eager to see if this time Trump, unlike Obama, can make a ceasefire in Syria stick; or whether, like Obama, Trump will be unable to prevent it from being sabotaged by Washington’s deep-state actors.

The proof will be in the pudding and, clearly, much depends on what happens in the next few weeks. At this point, it will take a leap of faith on Putin’s part to have much confidence that the ceasefire will hold.
—–

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.

As a CIA analyst for 27 years, he led the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and, during President Ronald Reagan’s first term, conducted the early morning briefings with the President’s Daily Brief.